49 CAPANNI SUL MARE 1987 EN
49 Capanni sul mare, 1987, oil on canvas, 43 x 53 cm
In this horizontal painting Catarsini proposes, even after many years, the setting of the wild southern coast bordered by the pine forests of the Migliarino park, San Rossore Massaciuccoli. Here too the sandy strip rich in dune vegetation occupies the lower part of the canvas. Green is the protagonist and indicates that we are in spring. Three white huts with brick-red roofs occupy the center of the painting; the one on the left is in the foreground and distanced from the other two close together a little to the right. The line of the shoreline is irregular and so the strip of blue sea is asymmetrical. The sky occupies the upper part of the canvas and dominates with its barely visible clouds streaked with pink and violet-blue.
Insights
The visceral love he nurtured for the motifs that had fascinated him since childhood will lead him to paint for seventy years the seascapes of the Viareggio coast, often populated by fishermen or solitary figures, frequently uninhabited and with rare huts like this one, with the three white parallelepipeds with red roofs and arranged along the slope of the shoreline, between the vegetation that grows in the sand and the blue line of the sea, the white of the waves and the blue of the sky streaked with clouds.
Thus, despite his most innovative works, the artist always returns to his landscapes, painting works dedicated to the sea and the beaches of Versilia with some expressionistic jolts. One of the main themes of his painting is, in fact, the relationship with his native land, which he made known in Italy and abroad: Viareggio, with its busy docks, silent canals, pine forests, the Versilia marinas, poignant and bare, the landscapes of an extraordinary territory that has enchanted artists and poets. Viareggio and its sea are his school of life and painting. Not the tourist and seaside Viareggio, but that of the docks and the still wild beaches between the pine forest and the sea, those landscapes that, in the words of Paloscia, constitute “the true lymph” of Catarsini’s pictorial discourse.
In May 1982 he was in Paris, for an exhibition organized by the Italian Cultural Center at the Grande Salle of the Chamber of Commerce at the Italian Embassy, where he was defined as “the last romantic of Italian painting”; the Municipality of Ferrara organized an anthological exhibition of his work at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna Massari and at Palazzo dei Diamanti, where mechanical compositions were exhibited. The following year the Municipality of Viareggio dedicated a vast anthological exhibition to him at Palazzo Paolina, curated by Mario De Micheli with 170 works, including oils, drawings and watercolours, and the Circolo degli Artisti of Turin organized a vast exhibition of his work. In 1984, the Centro culturale Saint-Vincent paid homage to his art and the Regione Piemonte promoted a personal exhibition of his work in Cuneo, as did the Galleria il Triangolo of Cremona. In 1989 the Associazione Piemonte Artistico e Culturale hosted an exhibition of his works selected from 1920 to 1984 in Turin, curated by Angelo Mistrangelo. In 1982, his 1957 Simbologia meccanica was sold for a very considerable sum at an auction held by Brerarte in Milan, which hosted it assiduously until 1989. The same fate befell one of his 1951 paintings in 1985, which was sold by Sotheby’s.